Time-hoppers from the future, led by Cheryl Ladd, are abducting airline passengers about to crash, and transporting them a millennium hence in order to reseed a future blighted by environmental disaster. This is a dangerou... more &raquos business, plagued by the specter of accidentally creating time paradoxes, which could throw the future out of whack. Unfortunately, they've lost a couple of the stunners they use to subdue troublesome passengers, and these fall into the hands of a curious physicist (Daniel J. Travanti) and an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board (Kris Kristofferson). Cheryl Ladd must retrieve these devices before a time paradox wipes out her world, but manages to complicate things by developing a romance with Kristofferson. All of which is very intriguing, having come from the short story, "Air Raid," by science fiction luminary John Varley, who also is credited with the screenplay. The part about airline abductions to save the disastrous future is straight from the original story, and the rest is expanded (you wouldn't say extrapolated) from it. The results are not very happy. About a third of the film is maddeningly wasted by repeating action from a different point of view. Seems natural when there are disparate timelines to deal with, but here nothing is added by the conceit. Only Travanti turns in a creditable performance as the physicist, bent on proving his theories about the future. He seems hungry for discovery, which is one of the things you want from a science fiction story, that sense of awe. But here it's just, "Aw, shucks!" --Jim Gay&laquo less

Movie Reviews

Millennium is a thinking man's scifi flick

Ted E. Johnson | North Potomac MD, USA | 07/08/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This movie is actually better than what others might think. But it requires your complete attention, and for a generation of people who are used to in-your-face MTV type short-attention span stuff, then skip this flick. However, I have shown this DVD on several occasions to groups of friends, and everyone enjoyed trying to figure out what was going on, and were surprised as I was, when time - travel was implicated. Cheryl Ladd was quite good as a cynical flight attendant, and Kris Kristofferson was believable as a man burned out on his job. I only with Travanti had more to do. Still, I highly recommend this flick to people who like to think when they watch a scifi flick."

An overlooked movie for sci-fi buffs

obabyhardr | CHICAGO | 12/11/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Millennium is one of those movies that has a great story line and even follows through with budget and special effects (for it's time not bad) yet fails to draw the crowd because it's an intricate story of time travel that can be at times hard to follow and even slow. But if you still dig movies like Logan's Run or Communion, you'll probably enjoy Millennium.It's a unique story of people far in the future who kidnap the bodies of people that are about to die. Their favorite source is planes that are about to crash. An official investigating discovers wrist-watches running backwards in the wreckage, and works with a physicist attempting to discover the truth about these visitors."

Cheese Whip Supreme!

the masked reviewer | Boston, MA | 08/10/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"If it strikes you as a little strange that a big-budget sci-fi extravaganza aspiring to be first out of the gate with the millennial doomsday theme starred Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson, you're already in the right mood for the 1989 time-travel howler Millennium. The fun begins when airline-disaster investigator Kristofferson meets mysterious airline employee Ladd while checking out the wreckage of the latest crash. Because Ladd, done up in an appalling perm and enough eyeliner to outfit a pack of raccoons, looks like she's about to shoot The Donna Mills Story, you first suspect Kristofferson might be the weird one -- he invites her to dinner. Then Ladd chain-smokes while eating, a dead giveaway that she's the movie's space case. And that's before she has sex with Kristofferson and gushes, "You're the best thing in a thousand years!" Apparently well aware he's not that good in the sack, Kristofferson responds, "The first rule is: Don't go to bed with anyone crazier than yourself. You're right up there on the top 10 of my Weird List, lady." To which Ladd replies, "If you knew me better, I'd be number one." Then, when Kristofferson's back is turned, Ladd disappears -- literally.

Wandering alone in the plane wreckage the day after this romp, Kristofferson comes upon what looks like a futuristic set of brass knuckles. And indeed, when he touches it, he's knocked out! Then, lo, a tacky blue hologram appears in the air, and Ladd steps out of it in S&M Tinkerbellesque regalia with a hairdo shaped like a giant Foster's Freeze soft ice cream swirl. Yes, Ladd is actually a human visitor from a thousand years into the future. She's here on a mission to -- well, let her tell it: "We're all dying. We can't have children anymore. We steal people from the past and send them somewhere else to start over, to give them a second chance." That's right: Ladd takes airline passengers who are about to crash and transports them to the future. But what about the dead bodies found after the crash? Ladd simply brings a supply of look-alike corpses from the future to leave behind in the live passengers' seats. Ah, but how does she get the passengers to cooperate? Well, that's what the brass knuckles are for, dummy.

Alas, two of the stunner devices were left behind on this latest crash and Ladd's got to retrieve them or "a paradox" will occur and destroy the future. A what? As Nobel Prize-winning physicist Daniel J. Travanti explains, "Say you build a time machine, go back, and murder your father when he was 10 years old. That means you were never born, and if you weren't, how did you build the time machine?" See, this is why Ladd was willing to sleep with Kristofferson - she thought he had the devices. So when Kristofferson sees the futuristic Ladd in the plane wreckage, she's still after the stunner, which she finds and takes with her in her tacky blue time-travel hologram before Kristofferson can ask her on a second date. Later, it turns out that Dr. Travanti has the second scanner, but when Ladd appears from the future this time, Travanti accidentally zaps himself to death with it. For reasons you really don't want to know, this causes the dreaded paradox, which compels Ladd to take Kristofferson back to her future world, where everything is rapidly coming apart -- which is hardly surprising since it's one of the cheapest-looking sets ever seen in a sci-fi pic. Just before the world explodes, Ladd resets the time-travel dial so she and Kristofferson can go even further into the future -- in hopes of more convincing production design, better scripts and more flattering hairstyles."

Interesting.

Micheal Hunt | Hellbourne | 06/29/2005

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I would have never seen this movie had my girlfriend not have picked it out of the cheapie bin 'cause she saw it years ago and was surprised I'd never heard of it.

The plot is about a cop (Kris Kristoperson) who is investigating a plane crash finds some weird things from the crash site. Time travellers from the future come back to rescue people, but during one of there procedures, something goes wrong and one of them is killed, and accidentally drops a futuristic device. Once they return to there future, a paradox shift in the universe rumbles through them and they realise they must send someone back to retrieve the device before someone works out how to use it and 'causes more ripples in the universe. (Creating more paradox's) One of the time travellers is Cheryl Ladd (Charlies Angels) she is sent back to retrieve the device and also try to stop Kris from investigating the plain wreck on a certain day. However when she thinks she failed she returns to the future, but if she had of stayed 10 more seconds she would have succeeded, she `causes another ripple and must return once again. And she falls in love with Kris' character.

I thought it was interesting to question what would happen if time travel were possible. Then n depending on WHAT you change in the past, how does that affect the future? I must say it's not as funny as when Homer Simpson travelled through time with his toaster and kept changing things, but on a more serious level I thought it was interesting where this movie went with it's approach.

The special effects aren't too bad, considering it is a late 80's movie. A few people criticize the future scenes as being ugly.... There supposed to be! The future in this movie is a dirty place, polluted so badly that smoking cigarettes is a breath of fresh air. (Now do you get it?). The elders where being kept alive in there tubes and that future is erased by the end of the film so that it never happened anyway which is what every futuristic movie needs to do because anybody's vision of the future will always be highly criticised for numerous reasons.

BONUS FEATURES:Look Ma, someone decided to talk about them!

The bonus features contain a trailer, a biography of the actors, and production notes. What I found to be very unique about the bios and notes was the text on screen is actually read to you! I've never seen that on any other DVD before, and I think more DVD's should have that on them.

On the production notes when you reach the last page there is an option to view the alternate ending. I give that bonus feature 1 star for the way it's shown. It spends 5 minutes showing the end scene again until they walk through the time portal to show 2 seconds of what they call the alternate ending. If anybody skips the production notes they wont even know there is an alternate ending on the DVD. And if they read the cover that says it's on there, they'd probably wonder where it is? Either the cover shouldn't have said it and it became an EGG or they should have made it a proper option.

People who criticise this film are just showing their lack of understanding a plot that went right over their heads. The idea to show scenes again from a different angle is interesting, and seeing a women come back from the future and she reacts to things she has never done before is also interesting... sure, they could have expanded further with all that, but this film is what it is and as long as you sit down with an open mind and stop concentrating on nitpicking how un-logical things are in this film (yet you probably think the Matrix makes sense) just watch the story unfold instead of worrying about how YOU would have directed things, why not just watch it for fun instead of looking for flaws, you might actually enjoy the film!"

Millennium

Linda Holden Givens | Auburn, Washington | 01/02/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I recently saw this movie and loved it. It is cheezy but a great SciFi."